The US military’s budget request for fiscal year 2015 includes cuts to a number of aircraft programmes, but Sikorsky and analysts call one item unique – the proposed cancellation of orders for 29 MH-60R Seahawks under a multi-year contract. If approved by Congress, such a move would raise broad concerns about the surety of other contractors’ multi-year procurement deals, and affect orders for UH-60 Black Hawks from the US Army and some foreign partners under the same contract.

“An actual [multi-year procurement] cancellation would be unprecedented,” says Richard Aboulafia, vice president of Teal Group.  Aboulafia calls USN’s proposal a “game of chicken”, and “a plea to Congress to insert the cash.” But if Congress doesn’t blink, “the navy might well need to either re-instate the contract or pay high cancellation fees,” he says.

While any additional space might be welcomed among U.S. travelers — a 2012 federal report found 69 percent of adults were overweight — the promotional value of Southwest gaining less than one inch of seat width was questioned by Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Fairfax, Virginia-based consultant Teal Group. The “ultimate commodity market” is U.S. domestic flying, Aboulafia said in a phone interview. “People go to a website, click on price, period.”

Aviation consultant Richard Aboulafia of Virginia-based Teal Group, who has read the report, said Rand did “a good job of documenting (what) has been an open secret in the airplane business,” which is that flawed government policies have led to the failure of Chinese aircraft manufacturing. “The Chinese have great talent, a great market, and great resources,” Aboulafia said. “You have to work awfully hard to destroy its prospects of getting into commercial aviation.”

Aviation expert Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., called it “potentially good news” but warned that, even if the flight data recorder and cockpit data recorder are found, they might not contain all the information needed to unravel the mystery. The cockpit recorder, for example, keeps only the last two hours of audio, which “could be two hours of silence,” he said.

But you can bet Delta will drive a hard bargain for the twin-engine 777s, although it may be hard-pressed to get the discounts it would like. “777 300ER has some of the best pricing in the business,” said Richard Aboulafia, analyst from the Teal Group, outside Washington, D.C. “‘What Delta would like is 50 percent off list, and they’re not going to get that with the 777 300ER. But given the bridge problem, they might do this in a few years.”